This week marks our official launch of our own Comparison Shopping Service (CSS), enabling your Shopping Campaigns to work smarter, accelerating their sales and growing your business.

We decided to launch our CSS following increased demand from clients to advertise their brands and products on Google’s Shopping services with ease. As a key source of ecommerce traffic, the Shopping service is an important channel for brands to reach out to customers already in the market for a specific product.

Our CSS will help our clients to benefit from the savings of a CSS and give you the option to test a CSS without having to sign up for a third-party service. The Silverbean CSS also helps you to save media spend, reducing Cost Per Click (CPC), allowing your ads to be shown to a broader audience at a lower cost and helping you to grow traffic while reducing spend.

What are Comparison Shopping Services?

Comparison Shopping Services, or CSSs, allow comparison websites to submit product data on behalf of merchants to Google Shopping. The service emerged in November 2017 after the EU commission found that Google was in breach of competition law for unfairly promoting its own shopping service on search engine results pages. Google was fined £2.2 billion and introduced the Comparison Shopping Service to avoid further accusations of non-compliance.

Specialist companies who operate price comparison sites can now compete with Google for Shopping Ad placements on Google search pages in the EU. The only difference in the ads is the ‘By’ label; instead of ads being promoted via Google Shopping, the product is advertised via the Comparison Site, as you can see at the bottom of the listings below:

How Can You Save Money with a CSS

Did you know that Google doesn’t use all of your bid in the auction? About 20% of your CPC gets skimmed by Google Shopping for their service fee. So a £1 CPC is really being served as £0.80. This is different to how a CSS operates, as they use the full bid amount in the auction. Therefore, if you set a £1 bid on a CSS, you will be able to outrank your competitor using a £1 bid through Google Shopping, and be served at a £0.80 CPC.

On average, CPCs are 20% to 30% lower on a CSS versus Google’s traditional Shopping Campaigns.

As part of Google’s agreement with the EU, from 1st November 2018 they are giving new CSS adopters up to 5% of their Shopping spend back every month (correct as of 4th October 2018), with a value of up to €100,000 per month. Google has not revealed how long this rebate will run for, but it is thought to be at least until January 2019.

We suggest testing a portion of your budget with a CSS (or multiple CSSs) while still leaving a portion of budget in Google Shopping. This allows a fair A/B comparison of what performs best for your products. As the old adage goes , don’t put all your eggs, or shopping campaigns, in one basket!

The amount of ad credits will be based on a fixed 5% of a partner CSS’s spend on Shopping ads for a given merchant during that calendar month.
These incentives will only apply when the spend for a given merchant and partner CSS is higher than $10 per calendar month.
The maximum ad credit available per merchant-CSS pair in any calendar month period is $100,000. In summary, any merchant that spends more than $10 in November (with a given CSS partner) will receive an ad credit following the calendar month. This will equal to 5% of their spend in this month, up to a maximum of $100,000.

Try Us Out

If you’re interested in how a CSS could work for your business, or want to test out a new CSS, we’re happy to have an informal chat anytime. Find out more about our PPC offering and get in touch with us today.

Head of Paid Marketing Hannah put her Marketing Management degree to good use and joined Silverbean with a wealth of paid marketing knowledge and experience. Her career accolades to date include being nominated for Google’s 'Women In Search' two years in a row, and winning both a Northern Digital Award for Best PPC Campaign AND a European Search Award for Best Local PPC Campaign.

Hannah is the senior point of contact for our larger accounts, including Clarks, Godiva and Explore!.